1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to an imaging apparatus, an imaging method, and so forth for capturing an image.
2. Description of the Related Art
In systems such as driving safety support systems for automobiles, automatic control systems for mobile robots, or surveillance camera systems for detecting a suspicious person or the like, the systems and the users thereof need three-dimensional positional information of the surroundings of the systems in order to made determinations or control the systems.
So-called binocular stereoscopic vision (also referred to as trigonometry) is widely used as a method of acquiring three-dimensional positions (see, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 6-167564). In the binocular stereoscopic vision, two cameras are arranged at mutually different viewpoints in such a manner that their fields of view overlap each other, and these cameras each capture an image. Then, a corresponding point between the two captured images is identified, and the three-dimensional position of the corresponding point is calculated by using the identified corresponding point and information on the two cameras such as their positions and orientations obtained in advance.
The imaging apparatus disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 6-167564, however, has a problem that its circuit scale is large. In other words, since the imaging apparatus requires the same number of imaging device (i.e., the aforementioned camera) as the number of the viewpoints in order to capture images from mutually different viewpoints, there is a problem that the circuit size is large.